Our people

Target 2006/07: To carry out diversity awareness training including age discrimination for at least 85% of BAA staff.
Performance against target: Some progress made

The issue

The change in ownership of BAA during the year has provided a fresh focus to our future planning. Like any progressive organisation, we have been implementing organisational change to ensure we have the people, with the right skills and development, doing the right jobs at Stansted.

Change, although inevitable, can be both unsettling and exciting for our staff. Our priority has been to put passengers first, to keep everyone at the airport safe and secure and to deliver good customer service. Key to success is equipping our people with the skills and development they need so they can be ambitious for themselves and the business for the future.

Our approach

Our key objective is to remain focused on delivering a safe, professional, friendly and efficient passenger service throughout our airport whilst we manage, complete and embed our change programmes. We also need to equip our people with the skills and development they need to make our ambitions for the business a reality.

Our strategy is:

• To build a high-performing organisation;
• With high-performing teams;
• Made up of high-performing employees.

It’s about getting the basics right and ensuring our people are well informed, well supported, listened to and involved so they can give us their best.

Our performance

At Stansted, BAA employs around 1,300 people which represents just over 11% of the total workforce at the airport (around 11,600 people work at Stansted).

Heightened security measures at all UK airports, along with our passenger growth has meant that we have had to increase the number of security staff in the past year to nearly 800, representing around 60% of the BAA workforce at Stansted.

Additionally our focus on providing good customer service every day means that around 95% of our employees are directly involved in customer service activities.As we see our number of employees grow, we are pleased to see a positive shift over the past 12 months on our diversity measures.
Throughout the past year, we have implemented changes to customer services, with reduced layers of management and clearer individual accountabilities needed for delivering the standard of service our customers expect. We have held rigorous assessments to ensure we have appointed the right people into the right jobs and have development plans to enable each job holder to reach maximum efficiency as quickly as possible.

As part of our responsibility as an employer, and to improve efficiency throughout the organisation, we continued to improve employee attendance through initiatives such as our Attendance Management Programme.

Launched this year, the scheme reflects best practice in managing attendance. Over the coming year, through schemes such as and similar initiatives, we aim to improve employee attendance even further.

One key measure of how we perform as an employer comes from our employee engagement survey – ‘Make Your Mark’. Each year, we poll all our employees to find out what they think we are doing well, and what needs improving.

We proactively share the findings of the survey with all our people and airport directors formulate plans to address those areas needing improvement, and take responsibility for delivery. And the community benefits too, as we donate £1 for each completed survey to a local charity. In the past three years, East Anglian Children Hospice, Isobel Hospice and Grove Cottage have all shared in a £2,000 donation.

Developing our people
With considerable change in the organisation, it has been a high priority to develop our current managers and employees to make the most of their potential. We continue to invest in our people – with £400,000 spent on skills development across a wide range of functions at the airport during 2006/07. Particular focus has been placed on leadership and coaching skills, personal development planning, attendance management and diversity awareness; with age discrimination training being rolled out to nearly all of our managers following the introduction of new legislation in October 2006.

Special attention has also been given to those employees who have gone, or who are going through, periods of organisational and cultural change at Stansted. Personal development plans are used to support individuals in setting realistic objectives for their current and new roles, plus new skills training modules have been developed to enable those new to the company, and new to roles, to reach their potential quickly and effectively.

We value the constructive way in which we work with our trade union partners at Stansted – a great example of which was the support the unions gave to the enforced changes to working arrangements during the security alert of August 2006. As well as this, the union has continued to work with us in developing a revised Partnership Agreement, that structures the way we work together. This agreement will be introduced shortly. Stansted is also actively supporting the establishment of Union Learning Representatives having spoken at the recent Regional TUC Conference about the importance of employers supporting partnerships with trade unions in the development of skills necessary for business success.

At Stansted, and across BAA, we continue to ensure that everyone knows what is expected in maintaining the highest levels of professional conduct, to ensure behaviour is beyond reproach, and to protect employees and the company from allegations of malpractice, and to offer a practical framework to support BAA’s ethics policy. With this in mind, BAA has recently launched a new Code of Professional Conduct to help guide our employees on issues such as secondary employment, areas of potential conflicting business interests and how to deal with the offer of gifts, awards and gratuities.

Our plans

We will:

• Embed the changes already introduced within the business;
• Focus on developing our managers and ensuring they have the skills and tools equipped to effectively manage and involve their teams; and
• Recruit more front line security staff in order to offer ever improving standards of customer service to passengers at Stansted Airport.

Target 2007:
To further reduce our level of absenteeism by 15% or more.

Data summary

Female to male breakdown

Age breakdown

Ethnic diversity

Length of service (years)